


We Can Be Good Again

by Schwoozie



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Alexandria - Freeform, Beth Lives, F/M, Memory Loss, Resurrection, Team Delusional
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-18
Updated: 2014-12-18
Packaged: 2018-03-02 01:13:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2794358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Schwoozie/pseuds/Schwoozie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You knew me?"<br/>"I knew you."</p><p>They play I Never, again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Can Be Good Again

**Author's Note:**

> _What I need is the dandelion in the spring. The bright yellow that means rebirth instead of destruction. The promise that life can go on, no matter how bad our losses. That it can be good again._

The stars are out, night has fallen, and she's looking at him with that hazed look in her eyes that means she's trying to remember. She gets that look more and more often, these days; sometimes when he sees her, goes to sit quiet in the house she's been assigned to share with a mother of five because one thing she did remember was how to hold a baby—when he goes to see her, when he sits quiet in the corner, when he watches her move around the kitchen making dinner with the back of her neck burned pink from his gaze and hands shaking from the vibration of his heart beats—sometimes she'll pause in her movements and her eyes will haze and she'll look at him like he's a portal to the past. Like he's the one to fix her.

He knows it's not true. He knows he's a Dixon and Dixons are made for breaking things—tramping through lives and carving scars and ripping out dandelions before they've bloomed. There's nothing he can give her, not really.

But he can't stop going back. He can't stop the tug he gets at the end of his work day as dusk begins to fall and he remembers that the air he breathes fills her lungs too, not the dirt and dust and maggots; that for all she can't touch a one of them without breaking into tears, for all she's screamed Maggie away for all the times the woman wouldn't stop _talking_ —and if that's why she accepts him, his silence, he'll take it, he'll take it all, even though he's never felt the need to speak in his life but now it's like all the words he's ever swallowed have risen from his gut and they long to travel the air from him to her—for all of that, she lets him sit on the couch as the five children run amok and she cooks dinner and her heart beats in the same room as his.

But it's changed, this time; it's changed, because for the first time since he tried to say with his eyes and nose and the shape of his brow—for the first time, they're alone. She's come to him in the dark.

“Why're you here?” he asks, finally, a table and memories and the lack of them between them, as she shakes herself awake in the quiet house. The ones he shares it with, Michonne and the Grimes's and a mousy woman from Arlington, they've all left to see the beautiful night. It's New Years Eve, say the people who are paid to know, and they can't set off fireworks but the DC schools had truckloads of chalk and if tossed high enough it almost mingles with the stars. Daryl would have gone with them, but the house was quiet and his heart heavy and maybe part of him knew Beth Greene would show up at his door.

“You didn't come,” Beth says—the woman who should be Beth, who showed up at the gates with Morgan at her side and a new name to match—Tabitha, because he had found her with a bible in her hand and a bullet through her head and not a memory to call her own—Beth says it, her eyes sharp and clear and he knows she's trying to learn him all over again.

But for her it's the first. He has to remember that. That it's only him that needs to learn a second time.

“Bad day,” he says, low, gravelly, scratching at the scruff he refuses to shave clean, no matter how Michonne teases. He won't say it's because he's fantasized about the sounds she would make as he eases himself across her thighs—the sighs and shakes when he breathes against her and makes her moan. He's fantasized—he still fantasizes—he pushes it away because she's alive in front of him and that's enough.

It should be. It should be.

“Tell me,” she says.

Tell her. Tell her of the horrors she's woken to, of all the good she can't remember, of a moonshine shack up in flames. Tell her how much she's still missed.

“You don't wanna hear this.”

“I do.” She raises a hand like she wants to reach for him, then lays it on the table, palm down, wrist resting on the turn of the wood. Her hands are tiny, delicate, strong—she used that hand to rip a man's leg off, all on her own with Daryl holding him down, her brow set and jaw firm and grip steady on the saw as it cut through skin and bone. She'd looked at that man for a long time, after, at the bloody stump where his leg had been, the pants his daughter was altering in the corner. She'd looked at them for a long time, and the next night her eyes were red from crying. He did not say anything, not a word, not even with the hands that in his mind reached and found and brought her to his chest like he should have so many times, like he should have that day, pulled her in and held her tight and never let go because it was not something she could do for him—she's held him tight, has Beth Greene, and at times like these it strangles.

“Was bad out there today,” he mumbles, half-hoping she won't hear, won't understand the words he barely mouths, in case she reads lips. But she's still watching him, expecting. Wanting something. “Lost some people. My fault.”

“It wasn't,” she says, so quickly they both blush and she looks at her hands, pale and firm.

“You don't know that.”

“I do.” She shrugs, like the movement doesn't shift her sweater off her shoulder and leave the skin pale to the moon, the quiet flicker of candles on the counter. It aches him, her face in candlelight, the fires it lights in her eyes.

“Don't matter,” he says, looking away from her skin, the wing of her collar made for his lips, for the brush of his hands like sacrament. “Just couldn't...” Couldn't do it, couldn't go, couldn't see one more person he wasn't able to save. He doesn't say it, doesn't know if she knows, yet, if Morgan's passed on the story Rick told. He hopes not. There's not much he'd ever want to remember about that hallway.

“Couldn't what?”

“Why ain't you at the party? Lillian didn't want to take you?”

“She did. She offered.” A little light comes into Beth's face. “Said the kids'd miss me if I didn't go.”

“Why're you here then?”

She doesn't answer him. She looks at the ceiling, like she can see the stars, like she's sunning herself in daylight. He can almost imagine the glow on her skin is from a wide open sky and not simply the way her whole soul is filled with fire.

“I told you,” she murmurs. She closes her eyes. “You didn't come.”

And it hits him as surely as a train that as much as he's missed her she's found herself missing him—and that hurts more than he could ever have imagined.

“I'm sorry,” he says, and he almost hears Merle's heckling in his head, that Dixons don't know no five letter words. Almost, because it's drowned out by her eyes on him again, the shine that says she knows.

“You... you knew me before. Right? That's why you visit?”

And doesn't that hit him. She's never wanted to know about the past, at least not in his hearing—whenever the topic of _before_ had come up, she'd retreat into herself, a shell of a shell wrapped tight around its interior. That she's asking now... he doesn't know if it's the season, or the air, or the fact that maybe his being brings her comfort, but she's looking at him with her living blue eyes and he'd step off the moon if only she'd share him those eyes every moment of his life. It's all he would ask of her, those eyes.

But it's not true. He knows it's not true. Dixons are greedy. They masticate, they consume. They don't leave girls like her standing.

But she's standing. She always has been. It's only because of her he can imagine standing at all.

“I knew you,” he says. He can't say more.

“Can we... can we play a game?”

It takes him back, and he stops it, he stops, the smell of the liquor and the dirt in her hair and the way she knelt on that filthy floor and offered herself up like the most virgin of platters—

“It might sound dumb, and maybe it is, but... you knew me.”

“I knew you.” It's easier to say, this time—the past tense. It's getting easier.

“Maybe... I'll say something I never did. And you tell me if it's true or not. And I try to guess for you.”

He would have put his face in his hands if he didn't need to soak up her face in this moment, search it for the recognition, the sign, the knowledge that this had gone before—but there's nothing—only the earnestness, the need, the trust that he can give her something better. Give her herself back. As if she ever belonged to him in the first place.

It was her. It was always her. It was her who held onto him.

“... A'right. We need something to drink though.”

“Like a drinking game?”

“Yeah.”

“You have anything?”

“Just water.”

“I'll get it.”

And she gets up, and he watches her—watches the soft sway of her hips, plumper than he's ever seen them for the months she's spent in this town, the way it's been to be mothered again—and he pictures himself gliding down those hips, holding them and worshipping them and letting them know touch. 

She doesn't remember being kissed.

He'd be the first in that too.

She sits back across from him, hands him one of their mismatched mugs, his a souvenir from Disney World, hers a World's Best Boss mug. He'd laugh, tease, about how bossy she is—how when he was ready to put a gun in his mouth she kicked him in the ass and got him going—and she wasn't bossy at all. She was warm. She was alive. God, she's alive.

“You wanna start?” she asks, when the silence goes on too long. That's all they are these days, are silences, the spaces between them.

“A'right,” he says, shifting in his chair and wanting to fold his legs, finger the air and picture pushing her shirt up past her nipples to lip and tug at the skin—God, he'd been a brute, that day, in more ways than one, and he's only glad all he left was a bruise on her wrist—Dixon, he's a Dixon, don't trust a Dixon, chase them round the mulberry bush—

She's fiddling with the handle of her mug and she's nervous and he's going first.

“Never got nothing from Santa Claus,” he says, and it breaks his heart.

“False,” she says. She smiles. “You're too good for coal.”

And he could cry, then, he could cry, could collapse into her lap and never rise for the feeling it chokes in his chest, the weighing of it—because it was a week ago, on Christmas eve, when he went to her house and found her asleep on the couch, thumb near her mouth like she'd been sucking it, or biting it like she's been wont to do—it isn't from him, she didn't get it from him, he hasn't been around enough, but what else could it be?—and her eyes were closed and her breaths even and he watched her and cried until the dawn broke through Christmas morning.

“Yeah. Yeah, I got something.” He takes a sip, and for all it's water it burns like wine. “Your turn.”

“Hmm,” she says, wriggling down in the chair, tilting her head back and smiling. “I never... never rode a bike?”

“I dunno.”

“You don't know?”

“Never saw you do it.”

“I thought you knew me.”

He squeezes his eyes. “Not enough.”  _Not enough_ .

“Ok.” She takes a sip, licks her lily-pink lips. “Go on.”

“Never had a pet pony.”

“True. You even know how to ride?”

His lip twitches at that. And there's something he does know; knows the first time she said two words to him was marching in while he was changing, shifting filthy boxer shorts to less filthy boxer shorts and he nearly brained himself on the bedside table trying to get back beneath the covers—and it had taken a day and a half for them to tell her where her favorite horse had gone and for a man who's offended plenty of women in his time he's never been as scared for his life as he was that day, blankets to his chin and tongue-lashed by Bethany Ann Greene.

“Badly,” he says.

“My turn.” She looks up again, then at him, and even in this low light he sees her blush. “I...” 

Silence. Silence

“Spit it out, girl.”

“I never... kissed you.”

If his head weren't attached to his neck he would have lost it then, floated away up into the clouds never to be seen again. She seems so agitated, biting her lip and sitting on her hands, like her entire life rests in this moment, like it's the last piece to the puzzle that will bring her back to herself. 

“Never,” he croaks. Her face drops and his heart thunders and  _she wanted it to be true_ .

“Alright.” She sips, dainty, the tiny muscles of her throat rolling like a symphony.

“I never wanted to kiss you.”

She stares at him. His throat is dry.

“Drink,” she says.

He drinks, and he feels like he's downed a desert.

“I...” She looks at him, at her glass, at the wall like she's entered a room she's never seen before. “I've never... gotten drunk.”

He can't help it, the way his chuckle sounds more like a giggle, the way the pitch rises and his hand cups his chin and he leans towards her and grins like he's Merle at fifteen in a bar flirting with his first college girl. “Nah, you did that one.”

Her eyebrows raise, and again, he swears she flushes. 

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“With you?”

“Uh-huh.”

“How'd I do?”

“Terrible.” He gazes at her, fondly. “You looked like shit too.”

She blinks. “Oh.” She takes a small sip, then a larger one, brows scrunched together and he's made her want to cry. He almost longs for it, her tears. Another sign she's living.

And she is—she's alive. She's Tabitha and she's Beth and she's Bethany and she's Ann and she's Hershel's and Maggie's and his. She's his. She is. She's been his all along.

They've just never known it.

“I fell in love with you that day.”

And the oh doesn't come this time, at least not in words; not the syllables or the breaths you need language to know. It comes from the clink of her mug on the table—the way her hands curl around it like they're gathering some hidden warmth. It comes from the crickets they can suddenly hear chirping outside, the over-awing quiet of a world where they might not die tomorrow. It comes from the memory—the memory of a hand in another hand, or a wooden post, cool on her cheek. Not a memory, but a seed of one; the wind, blowing.

“I think I did too.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> _From dust and ashes I have called you_   
>  _And dust you shall become_   
>  _In the end_   
> 


End file.
